The origins of the English

Porthos · The origins of the English

Here is something I wrote on the topic long ago on Antimoon.

"Here's the scenario, as I think it played out. My opinion is surely up to debate, and I would like to emphasize that this is just my personal opinion, or version of events, the way I see they logically occured.

There were about 3 million Celts in southern Britain after the Romans withdrew from Britannia. The Celts of Britain were never thouroughly Romanized as the Gauls or Spaniards were. Britain was Rome's most distant colony, and its climate and land, was not particularly attractive to Roman colonists, who preferred mediterranean terrain and climates, preferably with olive and wine country. So, there was very little Roman colonization of Britain, and Roman culture's influence was not felt as strongly as it was in Gaul and Spain. Thus, the only segment of the population that was truly Romanized, were the wealthy elite, and only partially Romanized at that. They spoke Latin, while the masses of Britons continued speaking Brytonic languages, and following British customs and culture, and religion.

Now, imagine you are a Briton in the early 400s. Your country has been devastated by plague, low agricultural production, and economic stagnation, for nearly a century. The population of Britain has been on a slow decline. The citizens of Roman Britain are not allowed to take arms, and depend solely on the Roman legions for defense. A large part of the local economy is dependent on the Roman legions stationed there, with entire towns and cities being sprouted up around Roman forts.

Now, it is the year 410 A.D. For the last three centuries, all of southern Britain has been pacified, and under Roman rule, under the Roman legal system and Roman government, and defended by Roman armies. This has been the way of life for generations. Now, all of a sudden, all the Roman troops withdrawl, and exit Britain. Now there is no source of protection against invasion, or internal division. To put it in modern terms, imagine you are a modern day American from the U.S. Imagine the entire U.S. military force, and domestic police forces, including the CIA, FBI, and NSA, suddenly vanishes. What sort of situation do you think would ensue? Obviously, there would be at least a brief period of anarchy, or chaous, maybe some occasional looting by civilians etc. As intelligent humans, eventually Americans would form groups, and establish a system of order, and provide for each other's common defense and vital needs. Most likely, without a central authority, there would be internal division, and the U.S. would be divided based on regional groups. If you were in Britain, different tribes would gather together under a powerful clan, and form seperate nations, which they did. At this point, the newly created regional governments would probably strive to restore order, and provide for basic civil sanitary needs, establish an army etc. This, the fractured kingdoms of Britain did. But, this rebuilding of order would be inferior to the former system of things, because it would take much time to rebuild society along new lines. The armies formed would not be up to the same tasks that a well established army was. For a modern day example, refer to Iraq. The newly formed Iraqi defensive force is still not up to the task of combating the insurgents.

So, what do you do? You are faced with incoming hordes of thousands of Germans, with poor means of defending yourselves. You are a divided people, fractured into seperate states, and your newly trained armies are not experience enough to withstand the onslaught of Germanic invasions, along with the invasions of Celts from Ireland. So, you hire mercanaries, who are themselves, German. You invited thousands of them to your land, and now, seeing that you are defenseless, they decide to turn on you, as most ancient peoples would. Your land has suffered a severe population decline, and you are not able to put up an adequate defense. So, the result is slaughter. Many are killed, and the smart ones flee. Proof of this exists in the fact that many refugees fleed to Gaul accross the channel, and established Brittany. We know that. So, why can't some believe that the rest of the refugees fled to the "Celtic fringes" of Britain, such as Wales?

In other areas which the Germans conquered and settled, they did not impose their language, religion, or culture on the native people. They adopted the local customs. But, England to this day, remains a Germanic culture. The reason I believe, lies in the fact that the English people descend from the Anglo-Saxons, and not mainly from the native Britons.

Genetic studies show that the English are nearly genetically identical to the people of Frisienland, in northern Netherlands. This is consistent with the fact that the languages of these two peoples are very closely related.

Hence, England speaks Angleish."

Porthos

Also, being that the genetic studies seem to contradict each other, I think our last option is to observe the actual physical apperances of the English, and compare it to other nations of the British Isles, and to continental Germanic speaking Europe. People from modern day Friseland and Jutland, are very tall, with very high rates of blond hair and blue eyes, etc.

The Welsh, and Irish and others of those type are a fair skinned, dark haired majority, but also with very high rates of red hair. The question is, do the English look more like the Dutch and peoples of Saxony or do they look more like their Briton neighbors? Here are a few examples of Celtic peoples (Welsh, Irish, etc.) who could almost pass for southern Europeans. Their dark features are actually very common in Ireland and Wales, or in the Highlands of Scotland, and it is something that distinguishes them from the English, generally speaking.

[img]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/7d/Cillian_Murphy_as_Johnathan_Crane_-_[/img]

[img]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/c8/Enya_-_Amarantine.jpg/175px-Enya_-_[/img]

Welsh girls speaking in Welsh:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Y71LMy8dm_Q

Irish woman newscaster, speaking in Irish:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=rqaI-s46UQA

Irish woman singing an ancient Irish folk song (Irish language)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=D6RC0m9p3YA&mode=related&search=

Fredrik

Porthos wrote:

Benjamin [inactive]

Just of interest, Josh, what made you think that the German spoof Pingu video was in Welsh? But actually, I don't think that the girls are actually speaking; they seem to be miming — so they could be Welsh, I suppose.

Porthos

Well Fredrik, you're a European, so you tell me. Likely, you've been to England, Holland, and Germany. And you've been exposed to much English media, so based on your observations, would you say the English look more British or more Teutonic like the Germans? Just answer one or the other, and don't sidestep the question please.

Porthos

The girls are Welsh. I know that for a fact. I actually found them before on youtube under the search of "Welsh girls". They look Welsh, and the words from the visual presentation in the introduction to this particular video are in Welsh, not German. And these three girls have other videos on youtube, several others in fact. The description of the videos also state that the girls are Welsh. And they do other songs in English as well.

Porthos

And here's a funny Welsh lesson for you guys.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=TexIK7mlgJw

Benjamin [inactive]

Porthos

Just trust me, they're Welsh. And I don't know very many Germans who have black hair and very dark brown eyes. It's not a typical German look, although there are a few Germans who might look like that. But with that fact aside, they are still Welsh. I know.

Benjamin [inactive]

Porthos

And I must say that the Welsh and Irish are some of the most attractive people in Europe, other than the Spanish, Portuguese, Italian girls, etc.

Deborah

Fredrik

Benjamin [inactive]

Fredrik

lol, yes, but they are lovely people.

Porthos

Fredrik

Sander

Porthos

I just assumed it was Welsh without really listening to it, as I knew the girls were Welsh based on the description of the video.

fab

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Porthos

Why do you always post things twice? It's like those obsessive compulsive people who have to say everything twice.

Deborah

Porthos

I found this article to be interesting:

http://www.peterrobins.co.uk/camino/British_Galicia.html

<<That Brittany was founded by British emigrants in the post-Roman period is well-known. The Breton language still flourishes and shows clear links with the British languages remaining in Britain. A quick look at a map of Brittany shows, for example, many placenames beginning with 'Lan' (the same as Cornish 'Lan' or Welsh 'Llan'; meaning 'enclosed holy place'), 'Tre' (identical in Cornish and Welsh; meaning 'settlement'), or 'Ker' (same as Welsh 'Caer' or Cumbrian 'Car' as in Carlisle; meaning 'fortified place', generally descended from Latin 'castrum'). Many of the religious centres in Brittany - St Pol, Dol, St Malo, St Brieuc - were founded by Britons, generally from what is now S Wales.

That British emigrants also settled in Galicia is much less well known. Since the end of the Franco regime and a general decentralisation in Spain, many Galicians have claimed Celtic roots, to establish, for example, common traditions in folk music. But this has generally been oriented to Ireland and the Gaels rather than Britain, and largely based on the well-known Irish tradition that the Irish originally came from Spain. Much of Iberia was Celtic in the Iron Age, and the language of the Celtiberians is thought to have been Goidelic; see, for example, Jesús Rodríguez Ramos's site. If so, this would point to a link between Iberia and Ireland. However, whether Iron-Age Galicia specifically was Celtic is less certain; evidence from archaeology, written records, placenames, etc is sparse.

There are however a dozen or so placenames in Galicia beginning with 'Brit-' or 'Bret-', which may (or may not) hint at a British influence. A distinctive feature of the Galician landscape is the castros, Iron-Age hill-forts of which there are several thousand in NW Iberia (see for example paper in E-Keltoi for more info). Intriguingly, one of the finest of these is the Citania de Briteiros, now in N Portugal but in what was formerly Galicia and close to where S Martin set up his monastery at Dumio.

The best-documented link between the British and a 'Brit' placename is however Bretoña, described in a series of ecclesiastical documents from the C6 onwards. Put briefly, these document a British see, churches and a monastery (ad sedem Britonorum ecclesias que sunt intro Britones una cum monasterio Maximi) and one Mailoc, bishop of this see (Mahiloc Britonensis ecclesiae episcopus). This documentation is well summarised in a booklet Historia de Bretoña by Antonio García y García, Emeritus Professor at the Pontificia University in Salamanca, and published by the Diputación in Lugo, though unfortunately now out of print. There's a review in English on the Heroic Age website by Simon Young, a British researcher who has taken an interest in the subject. The latter has set up a website (also available here; this includes an extensive bibliography) and written a book Britonia: Camiños novos (in Galician; see review on website of the Breton-Galician twinning organisation, though 'Comme chacun sait' is stretching it a bit; 'Comme presque personne sait' would be more like it!); an item of his summarising the position appeared in History Today.

Besides these specialist works, more general works on Galicia and the British also mention Bretoña: R.A.Fletcher's study of Diego Gelmírez St James' Catapult does so and is now available online at the American LIBRO site (see Chapter 1 and search for 'brit'); a good recent summary of our knowledge of the British in general, which includes the Galician settlements, is Christopher A. Snyder's The Britons (Blackwell, 2003 - interview with author at Oxbow Books). There are quite a few Bretoña-related websites around: the Diputacion have some info in their list of municipalities; see also Pangalaica and Galicia Espallada; there is a yearly Lugnasad festival in Bretoña parish: see here and here; and there's a tradition that Maeloc's treasure is buried on the nearby mountain of Cornería (see Barreiros site) - a story that bears more than a passing resemblance to British legends.

The presence of a British settlement in Galicia, based in Bretoña where it reoccupied an existing castro, is thus well documented. We do not know when the Britons arrived, though the presence of a see in 569 and its participation in the Council at Braga implies that the community was already well established by that time. García y García states that S Martin's monastery at Dumio was organised on Celtic lines; it's tempting to speculate that this was due to the influence of the British colony - where else would a Celtic church influence have come from? Or was this founded by another British colony? Was this why the Citania was named 'Briteiros'? Though we do not know how widespread the British community at Bretoña was, the diocese appears to have been quite large and extended into what is now Asturias. Although the see was destroyed by the Moors in 716, and later moved to S Martin de Mondoñedo and in the C12 to Mondoñedo itself, references to Britons continue for several hundred years. Simon Young raises the interesting possibility of a Brythonic-speaking people in Galicia as late as the C13 - after the Liber Sancti Jacobi.

Nor is that quite the end of the British-Galician ecclesiastical links: substantial trade links between Britain and Galicia continued throughout the Middle Ages, supplemented by the transport of pilgrims to Santiago, and in 1555 a London merchant named John Dutton brought an image of the Virgin from St Paul's Cathedral (where it was in danger of being destroyed by Protestant iconoclasts) to . . . yes, Mondoñedo, where it continues to be venerated to this day, though as La Inglesa not La Britoña!

Although you would think that Galicia and Britain were too distant to matter very much to the early Church in Rome, this is far from the case. In a curious parallel between these outposts of the Roman Empire, both had charismatic church leaders whom Rome felt threatened by and declared heretical: Priscillian in Galicia and Pelagius in Britain. And when Rome decided that the Anglo-Saxons should be converted, it sent a special envoy, Augustine: Britain was obviously too important to leave to the British church. Galicia of course became one of the leading pilgrimage centres in Christendom. How deliciously ironic if, as some maintain, the shrine in fact houses the remains of the heretic Priscillian!

Though we do not know when the Britons arrived in Bretoña, there is the curious fact that the tribe to the east of Bretoña was called Albiones; a memorial stele to one Nicer Clutosi, 'Princeps Albionum', was found near Vegadeo in 1932, and is now in the Asturian Archaeological Museum in Oviedo. Albion/Albiones was also a term used by various Greek and Roman writers, including Pliny, to describe Britain and its inhabitants. It's clearly linked to Alba/Alban, the word for Scotland in modern Celtic languages, and is listed in the Celtic Lexicon of the University of Wales' Celticity Project as the Proto-Celtic root for Britain.

Archaeology tells us there was extensive trade between Iberia and the British Isles in both the Bronze and Iron Age. Whether or not Galicia was Celtic, there is archaeological evidence of prehistoric peoples from Brittany settling in Galicia. Recent genetic research too points to peoples all along the Atlantic coast from N Spain to Scandinavia being related since the Ice Age. Substantial trade between the Mediterranean, especially Phoenicia/Carthage, and Britain, especially for tin, is well documented (one theory of the origin of the word 'Britain' is that it is Phoenician Baratanak, 'land of tin'). Although the main Phoenician entrepot in Iberia was Cadiz, it's by no means impossible that traders made use of existing trade patterns between NW Iberia and Britain.

All in all, it begins to look as though it is our own time that is the aberration: links between the peoples of NW Iberia and the British Isles were much closer in prehistoric and historic times than has been the case since the C16. The old legend of the Irish originating in Spain was simply part of a much broader pattern of movement of peoples along the Atlantic edge of Europe.>>

Daniel

You wanna know what Welsh sounds like? Here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a0IVfJlFAM

Porthos

Thanks, but I have heard Welsh many times before.

Fredrik

Cool! They use Welsh as a secret language in Big Brother!

Porthos

Fredrik

Hehe, yes. It used to drive me crazy too, when, as a small boy, my mum and aunt discussed what I would get for Christmas, in German!

About the Anglo-Saxon vs. Celtic thing:
I have always been fascinated by the meeting of those two cultures in the Western Midlands / Welsh Marches, especially as it seems to have bred a very lyrical mood, that mix of Germanic homeliness and Celtic longing. And the border river Severn seems to be the essence of it.

Ivor Gurney wrote this in his "Song":

Only the wanderer
Knows England’s graces,
Or can anew see clear
Familiar faces.

And who loves Joy as he
That dwells in shadows?
Do not forget me quite,
O Severn Meadows.

And A.E. Housman obviously experienced the Celtic - Anglo-Saxon conflict as a conflict still going on within himself:

The Welsh Marches

HIGH the vanes of Shrewsbury gleam
Islanded in Severn stream;
The bridges from the steepled crest
Cross the water east and west.

The flag of morn in conqueror’s state
Enters at the English gate:
The vanquished eve, as night prevails,
Bleeds upon the road to Wales.

Ages since the vanquished bled
Round my mother’s marriage-bed;
There the ravens feasted far
About the open house of war:

When Severn down to Buildwas ran
Coloured with the death of man,
Couched upon her brother’s grave
The Saxon got me on the slave.

The sound of fight is silent long
That began the ancient wrong;
Long the voice of tears is still
That wept of old the endless ill.

In my heart it has not died,
The war that sleeps on Severn side;
They cease not fighting, east and west,
On the marches of my breast.

Here the truceless armies yet
Trample, rolled in blood and sweat,
They kill and kill and never die;
And I think that each is I.

None will part us, none undo
The knot that makes one flesh of two,
Sick with hatred, sick with pain,
Strangling—When shall we be slain?

When shall I be dead and rid
Of the wrong my father did?
How long, how long, till spade and hearse
Put to sleep my mother’s curse?

Porthos

Fredrik

On Antimoon I once wrote:
"I have been to Wales (very funny to hear people speak Martian in the shop and suddenly changing into English for your sake..), but the next time I go to the UK I want to go to the Welsh Marches, the piece of England bordering Wales. Because logically the further west you go in England the less Anglo-Saxon and Germanic it gets and more and more Celtic and mysterious... As far as I know nobody has written great poetry about the old Danelaw, but Shropshire was immortalized by Housman and Gloucestershire by Ivor Gurney."

And then a Scot (Damian) replied:
"Ivor Gurney was from nearby Dymock, over the county border in Gloucestershire. It seems to be an area that bred a number of poets, such as John Masefield, a former Poet Laureate who came from Ledbury in Herefordshire, as did Elizabeth Barrett Browning and William Langland (of Piers Plowman fame). Just over the hill came musical talent in the shape of Edward Elgar, who composed England's unofficial anthem "Land of Hope and Glory" from Pomp and Circumstance."

And I have read that the west of England was historically much more characterized by pastoralism than the rest of the country and pastoralism is of course much more romantic than e.g. potato growing.

Those blue remembered hill of Shropshire: